I miss the Goodwill in Sioux City, Iowa, with almost a homesickness. I found great bedding, and all those clothes I never had to buy for my family before... alien items like longjohns and wool socks and snow boots...

We were homeschooling much of our time up there; I found excellent history books NOT filled with liberal claptrap (huh! my favorite ended after WWI!). I supplemented with what I wanted to add, about native peoples' plights and forgotten women and whatever, without having to filter out the humanist/New Age stuff \"modern\" books intertwine with truths about European abuses.

I understand the concept of filtering materials... and pledges and prayers, for that matter. We need to have some discernment, being led by the Spirit and the Word.

But... I'm not worried about the political leanings of the originators of the Pledge of Allegiance. I wouldn't even be worried about the under-agenda of the originators of the Planned Parenthood philosophies, if only they worked themselves out for the glory of God today.

People can be right for the wrong reasons and vice versa. Following the ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the phrase ‘one nation under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah responded in an article. If you do not know the site, it is one defined significantly by Pre-Millennialist theology. That means not only is Hal Lindsey, master kook of sci-fi PM, a featured columnist who tells readers how moves made by the godly Sharon and the various Satanic Palestinians are prophesied right there in your Bible (which being perspicuous you would be able to understand if the Holy Spirit had filled your heart, enabling you to see PM as the omphalos of Scripture), but that the site is a mixed bag of Paleoconservatism and Big Government Imperial Conservatism focused largely on serving as guard dog for Israel.

To be fair, Farah does feature Pat Buchanan as a columnist, and ole Pat is hated by the Big Government and Israel-worshiping neoconservatives as much as is Joe Sobran. In addition, Farah’s article \"Happy Dependence Day,\" in which America is quickly compared to the declining Roman Empire, is a firm, if too brief, Paleoconservative analysis. His July 4th article \"The Second War for Independence\" follows up with the necessary advice: we must learn to say no to governmental tyranny. I hope these articles are harbingers of WorldNetDaily shifting in its commentary section more fully away from Big Government Imperial Conservatism to limited government, decentralized Paleoconservatism.

Farah’s response to the ruling is to plead for people to exit the public schools en masse. Before he gets to that point, he coughs up a number of slight distortions. His claim that \"America is the first country in the world to be created in the image of a godly nation\" is the kind that makes me wince. Even if the Founding Fathers, every single one of them, were certain that was what they were doing, that was never the result. But they were not doing any such thing; they, including the deist Jefferson and the probably agnostic Franklin, were attempting to create a nation that would foster liberty for its citizens and prevent the rise of government tyranny that would swallow the liberties. While a number of them were well versed in Scripture study, they did not, as Farah asserts, study \"the Bible to see what it revealed about the way men should govern themselves.\" While collectively they understood that sound Christian morality as societal bedrock was necessary to responsible self-government, and none of them would have approved of the modernist type of secularism that is merely anti-Christian, they primarily studied the writings of Western political philosophy from the ancients through the Enlightenment, as well as the failures of UK governments, in order to learn how to arrange a system of self-government.

The Bible is in no wise a treatise on civil government. Those who study it to find truths about the best type of government (as opposed to truths about moral conduct and belief systems needed for governors to serve the governed justly) and desire some form of representative republic or democracy will inevitably run into a firm wall: Scripture does not endorse either in any way. There was no democracy in ancient Israel, either in the period of judges or the monarchies. There is no suggested democratic plan for the church. There is no Scriptural call for Christians to resist the undemocratic Roman Empire and establish a Christian democracy. Considering what has happened in every Western democracy, it is reasonable to conclude that modern democracy actually weakens Christian beliefs and leads to societal decadence that eventually turns to rip all trace of Christian morality out of the fabric of the culture—with leaders of many churches cheering the process for its inclusiveness and tolerance in the democratic spirit.

That said, Farah is correct in asserting that the spirit of militantly secularist, socialist reform is firmly entrenched in American schools. As we, the tax-slaves of the Empire forged by Lincoln on the corpse of states’ rights, are required to financially support the decadent public schools and state universities regardless of their continued failures in all areas, save multicultural war against the heritage of Western Christian Civilization, the system will fail only when the USA collapses from its internal rot. The money we tax-slaves are forced to pay to support a system determined to destroy our heritage means also that the system has no financial incentive to ever correct itself.

That leaves us with three choices: 1) send our children to that work of anti-intellectual evil and reinforce the negative influences they receive from popular culture and peers (including those who attend church regularly); 2) find that rare private school today that has not capitulated to most PC outrages (the preponderance of church-related schools have so fallen); 3) homeschool.

Homeschooling that is merely an anti-intellectual flight from the immoral public schools is worth little, and that remains true no matter how many Bible verses are memorized. Thus I recommend only what has come to be called Classical Christian education. Just as it is both absurd and an indirect alliance with the anti-Christian and anti-white multicultural Left for devoutly believing Christians to reject the need to learn from ancient European pagans, it is absurd and the essence of anti-intellectual barbarism supporting the Left (wittingly or not) for non-Christians (whether agnostic, atheist, or theist) to reject the need to master the European Christian writings that along with those of pagan ancient Greeks and Romans are the apex of world culture.

As several readers have asked me about homeschooling, I here recommend that anyone considering it contact both Kolbe Academy and Veritas Press. The former is Catholic and the latter Calvinist. I have used curriculum ideas and ordered books from each. Best of all, each has people who are glad to talk to homeschooling parents, to answer questions and give advice. For those parents who feel inadequate as potential educators of their own children, course outlines are available.

************

That aside, it is time to address the Pledge of Allegiance issue. The author was Francis Bellamy, a New England native, a pure Yankee WASP Baptist minister, and a Socialist. His cousin, Edward Bellamy, was a famous Socialist and novelist, a major influence not merely on early-20th-century American socialism but also on the quickly emerging socialism that would capture England. The desire to remake Christianity in the mold of modern socialism was strong among the Yankee children and grandchildren of veterans and supporters of the Unionist War to destroy states’ rights. The two go hand in hand. The link can be observed easily at the end of the 19th century around Edward Bellamy. His most famous novel Looking Backward inspired the founding of ‘Nationalist Clubs’ focused on progressive, socialist changes; many members were devotees of the Grand Army of the Republic. The religious auxiliary of the Boston Nationalist Club, the largest and most influential, was the Christian Society of Socialists.

National Socialists, whose concept of nationalism is to destroy regional and local autonomy, who praise the army of the centralized government for waging war against civilians, are always itching to use whatever force is deemed necessary to institute sweeping social-engineering reform. Recall that the word Nazi is a nickname for National Socialist.

Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge specifically to use the public schools as a tool toward indoctrinating children into his socialist vision of patriotism. He and other Christian Socialists were WASP Reformers, WASP Puritans for the advent of the 20th century. They believed that the moral evils of theft, violent crime, prostitution, intemperance, ‘excessively large’ families, governmental abuse and corruption, and covetousness would be overcome only by Socialism: then we would see the 1000-year Paradise. They advocated strong, activist government to serve the interests of the ‘weak’ against the ‘powerful.’ One of their slogans, which could have come from Stalin or an Orwell character or The Borg in Star Trek: the Next Generation, was, ‘We are members of each other.’

Because they were culturally WASP, it was inevitable that they would: 1) ally with the emerging northern Jewish community in this call for an increase in government powers to do good, which necessitated secularizing the nation in a modern sense (the phrase \"under God\" was not in the Pledge until the Eisenhower years, when Americans were encouraged to support the Cold War against the atheist Soviets); 2) see as a paramount work the economic and political uplifting of black people, exemplified by the founding of the NAACP (from its inception, beloved by Marxists, Socialists, Social Gospelers, and atheists black, white, and Jewish); 3) see as the two main ‘reactionary’ enemies of their reform efforts Irish Catholics and Southerners. Being typical WASPs, they saw poverty among blacks as a sign that they must become more forceful in their Social Gospelism and erect governmental socialism to help blacks, while they saw poverty among Irish Catholics and Southerners as proof positive those peoples were inherently inferior culturally and morally to WASPs (and perhaps to blacks) and were standing defiantly against the tide of Progress; thus the identities and traditional values of both Irish Catholics and Southerners were to be warred against.

Do not skip over the fact that the traditional values of the two most conservative, the two most devoutly orthodox Christian, groups in America at the end of the 19th century were warred against by WASPs in the name of promoting Progressivism, if not necessarily full-scale Christian Socialism. The source of successful 20th-century leftism in America cannot be blamed on Jews or blacks or feminists (though from the 1830s feminism and black issues were important to all facets of WASP reform).

Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 in conjunction with works of various ‘Progressives’ moving to establish a nationwide system of public schools that would serve to indoctrinate children into Yankee-defined Christian Nationalist Socialism. John Dewey, a Christian Socialist who would evolve naturally into an atheist, called Edward Bellamy the ‘Great American Prophet’ and stressed his vision of public schools teaching children to embrace the \"intentionally progressive\" society. William Torrey Harris, longtime head of the National Education Association (founded in Philadelphia in 1857 specifically to indoctrinate children of Irish immigrants into WASP conformity euphemized as ‘Americanizing’), loved all things Prussian. Just as he idealized all-powerful, tightly-centralized government on the Prussian model, Harris knew that an all-powerful public school system on the Prussian model that stressed unthinking conformity to Yankee WASP prejudices (such as Mayflower Pilgrims being taught much more prominently than the earlier Jamestown settlers and Southerners presented negatively while blacks are presented as the ultimate innocent victims) and, more important to Harris, unquestioning support of the federal government was necessary to his vision of an American Christian Socialist Empire.

Bellamy’s pledge was perfectly designed to advance the cause of general socialist acceptance within a few generations: shift patriotism from respect and love for place and ancestry (think Latin patrios) to allegiance to an abstraction; stress the virtually omniscient presence of the central government by having children mouth the lie that it is \"indivisible\"; mention nothing in the pledge about traditional values; require children to parrot the pledge while adoring the flag much as children in Nazi Germany later worshipped the Swastika flag. Then watch simpleminded politicians denounce as unpatriotic anyone who does not accept this socialist pledge as the Creed of the sacrosanct Yankee Empire.

I do not recite any pledge written by a socialist and wholeheartedly endorsed by his socialist peers; nor I will allow my children to do so. If you are not a socialist and you do recite what is nothing more than a pledge to Yankee National Socialism, then you are the dupe necessary to the rise of multiculturalism, including pro-black and anti-white race-socialism, and the cultural, intellectual, and moral decline inevitably following.

Seeker: Uuuhhhh... yeah. And your point is? I suppose you pick apart with tweezers the info available about the politics, philosophies, religion, restaurant preferences and toilet habits of every author of every thing you deign to read? How about the owners of every store you condescend to shop in? How about re: the owners, managers and importers of every item of clothing you wear?

seekr: Thanks for signing \"Maurine\".

JHTM & Booty: Y'all watch it. Any of us with those purity filters on our computers will not receive such postings. It's only due to pirates' treasure that \"Booty\" gets thru at all... and now y'all go on and add (usually) extra-marital pregnancy... :angry: ;)

LOL, Janine. I wonder if the Goodwill is okay? Or are they these awful pro-this, anti-that, socialist, whatever the hippity-hoo-hah? I condescend to shop there sometimes. Especially when in search of my husband some \"new\" pants. I should not tell this, but I will anyway. The man, God bless him, wears out the cuffs of his slacks because he'll take his socks and shoes off and keep his pants on (um, I'm talking about here at home, okay, guess I should make that clear!) and that causes him to walk on the cuffs, and they get frayed. \"Take off your pants!\" I'll say. LOL \"Better a man walks around his abode in his boxers than to wear out the bottoms of his pants legs.\" - Proverbs 32:1 (Maybe this is why they walk around like that - only in briefs, not boxers, as I recall - in Slums of Beverly Hills, a movie I probably shouldn't own up to having rented and watched and even laughed hysterically at.) Anyway, sometimes he still puts off taking off his britches, and then there ya go. So finally I said, \"Honey, if you won't put forth the effort, then I'll just have to stop shopping for you nice pants at Wal-Mart (LOL) and go get you some over at the Goodwill.\"